Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress on Monday that COVID-19 would have possibly originated in a Chinese lab, but was not created with funding from the U. S. government.
Fauci gave that impression before the House Oversight and Energy and Commerce committees on Monday in his first public testimony since his retirement in December 2022, saying he “can’t explain” experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China that were not funded through the National Institutes of Health.
Republicans on the coronavirus pandemic subcommittee posit that the NIAID budget given to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology could lead to a lab leak that gave rise to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. -19.
The former NIAID director responded to questions from Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) about the option of a lab leak by saying it was conceivable, but not with NIH funding.
“What I’m saying is that I can’t account for, and no one can account for, other things that may happen in China, that’s why I’ve said and I’ll say now that I’m open-minded. brain about what will happen. . . the origin is,” Fauci said. But the one thing I’m sure of is that viruses phylogenetically funded through the NIH may not be the precursors to SARS-CoV-2. “
Fauci said it’s “molecularly impossible” that the viruses experimented on under NIAID’s EcoHealth subfunding were simply connected to SARS-CoV-2 because they’re “so distant. “
“It’s a virological fact,” Fauci said.
EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak testified before Congress in May that there were about 15,000 virus samples at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected under insufficient funding from EcoHealth that it no longer had after the Trump administration ended the grant project.
The Department of Health and Human Services has initiated exclusion proceedings against EcoHealth and Daszak to prevent them from receiving federal funding.
Although Fauci has said that a lab leak may simply be viable speculation about the origin of the virus, he has explicitly denounced some derivative concepts related to his role in the origin of the virus, adding his own to the CIA.
“What is a conspiracy is the kind of distortions on this specific issue, like it’s a lab leak, and I parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA they shouldn’t talk about a lab leak,” Fauci said. he said, referring to his alleged meeting with CIA officials.
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The lack of a record of Fauci’s meeting at the CIA has partly fueled hypotheses about his influence on the intelligence community’s report on the origin of the virus.
Fauci has denied talking to the CIA about the COVID-19 pandemic.